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I’m perfectly aware I’m going off-line but I’d really like to know how Joseph displays his tomatoes when he goes to market. I’m posting two pictures of the stall of a young French couple of professional gardeners. You may be interested in prices on that market : 4.50 euros /kg, about 2$/lb and about 2 $ the small box. The green label indicates the tomatoes are organic, the grower must follow precise rules, his fields are visited several times every year. Hybrids (not here) are of course much cheaper but there are enough customers ready to pay more to have quality and taste.I hope Joseph will have some time to spare and show us his selling place , of course when he thinks the time has come

I grow mostly saladette tomatoes because they mature weeks earlier than other varieties. These are mostly Ot'Jagodka and Matina.

Here's one from very late in the season when larger tomatoes are available:

I grow a lot of bulk canning tomatoes: Price is 26 pounds for $15.

Tomato plants at market this spring:

As I transition towards growing mostly yellow/orange tomatoes, I'll get more diversity of colors, but fluted, or lumpy, or catfaced, or cracked don't sell around here, and large tomatoes don't grow well here, so I'm continue to take mostly small to medium sized fruits.

Big thanks to Joseph who gives us a full panorama of his selling activities, I’m sure I won’t be the only one to appreciate the perfect blend of colors and shapes on the stall. It will be difficult to believe your « salesmanship tends to be quite boring ». I am quite impressed by the variety of the products, a customer can find all he needs on the same stall. The touch of a family business is worth noting, people feel more secure when the whole family takes part in the work. I also noticed fruit trees are present on the farm ; I’m wonderering how many hours of sleep Joseph can get when days only have 24 hours.

There sure is a wide variation in fruit set and ripening times among the F2 of the cross between DX52-12 and Jagodka. One plant is already ripening fruits while other plants have yet to set their first fruit.

The plants that had highly exerted stigmas early on have industrial type flowers now. I've noticed that a few times already... Early flowers are more likely to have exerted stigmas in my garden and then the flowers revert to inserted stigmas later in the season.

To show my attitude towards problems with tomato plants... On Friday I was in the garden picking tomatoes, and noticed a plant (yellow pear) on which the leaves were turning yellow/brown. It was a large plant, full of green tomatoes that would ripen in a few weeks whether or not the plant died.

I yanked up by the roots and tossed into a fallow area of the field. If a tomato is going to be allowed to grow in my garden next year, then it has to have grown perfectly healthy this year. (In theory, it still has a chance to volunteer next year, but the odd are much lower than if it convinced me to save seeds.)

I didn't try to determine if it was a blight, or a mineral deficiency, or an insect, or whatever. It was just cull, Cull, CULL!!!

I am growing some crosses between domestic tomato and pimpinellifolium. A couple of those will be culled because they can't out-compete the flea beetles.

Yesterday I spent time with the F2 clade of [DX52-12 X Jagodka]. There are 28 surviving plants. I culled about 5 plants the first time I scored the patch. There weren't any flowers that looked suitable for adding to the promiscuous pollination project. Fruit size of some plants were somewhat larger than the largest Jagodka fruits. I harvested 16 ripe fruits today, and 5 last time I scored the patch.

Three plants scored high for vigor and for fruit set. 4 plants scored high for fruit set and medium or low for vigor. Some of the plants that scored high for vigor are not setting fruits yet. Not good for my climate.

All the plants are determinate. Fruits are expected to be red, but I put "orange?" in my notes for one plant... I picked the ripe fruits and am letting them ripen further in the barn.

This year I have several landrace cherries that early on matured fruit in shades of orange but now, later in the season, are maturing as bright red. I don't think it was just a case of not wanting to wait to pick those first fruit ; I think the stronger sun and warmer temperatures are responsible. It is an interesting effect.

F2:[DX52-12 X Jagodka]-10. This plant would have been culled already, except that I numbered the plants after the first culling, and it would mess up my numbering scheme to cull it now.

F2:[DX52-12 X Jagodka]-19

Segregating Hybrid of some sort or other. It has a sibling which is indeterminate.
Large Yellow Determinate:

The Wild Crosses were made by a collaborator. They are F2 or later. Some of them were spectacularly unsuited to my garden. None of them thrived here, but some of them produced a few fruits. Flea beetles were particularly troubling to them. The flowers were all tiny and industrialized types.

Joseph... How has your Sungold's tasted? I know there are alot you don't like to eat, but how would you describe the taste for somebody else? Maybe one day you'll find your perfect tomato other than Jagodka.

I haven't done formal taste testings yet. I've nibbled at some of them. As far as I can remember they tasted horrid. Definitely not up to the standards of F1 Sungold.

I suppose that I should make a taste scale and rate my tomatoes formally.

It might include categories for:

Overall: recently I've been liking 3 point scales for scoring plants: High, Medium, Low. Small, Medium, Large, etc. Perhaps overall score could also be three points. 1) Wouldn't grow it if it was the last tomato on Earth. 2) Grow it because people want tomatoes. 3) I can almost enjoy the taste.

I recruited a helper today that says she likes tomatoes... We picked the F2 hybrids of [DX52-12 X Jagodka]. I asked her to taste a fruit from every plant... She ranked the taste as 1- Kinda Bad, 2- Kinda Meh, 3-Good. She gave 2 plants a score of Zero, even though that wasn't an option, and one plant a score of 3+ saying it was the best tasting tomato of the day.

I tasted those that she said were really good or really bad. I agreed with her assessment. One that we both thought was really bad was watery. The other had an off-taste.

The most productive tomato in the patch today didn't score well for taste. Oh well. Eventually I may crunch the data to decide what to plant next year. I think those that scored zero or 1 on the taste test won't be replanted. And maybe not even those that scored 2.

One of the F1 hybrids that I managed to grow in the basement overwinter was [Jagodka X Loose/Open]. Don't know who the daddy was, other than it had an open flower structure. I managed to get 13 F2 plants ready by early summer. Today I scored the plants, and selected the ones I want to save for seed. Daddy was a red-fruited determinate plant with a somewhat longer growing season than Jagodka. All of the flowers of the F2 had industrialized flowers.

F2: Jagodka X Loose/Open

Among the F2 of [Hillbilly X Jagodka] I found some indeterminate plants with internode-distancess about 1/3 the length of some of the other plants. What that did, was make them compact plants that almost resemble determinates. I collected the first blushing fruits from the patch today. I'm letting them finish ripening in the shed.

I made my final (until I change my mind) determination today about what plants to save a lot of seeds from in the [DX52-12 X Jagodka] F2 clade. I tasted fruit from every plant. Bleck!!! More details about that in a post in a few days. I ended up eliminating some plants based on bad taste. I eliminated a lot based on small fruits. I eliminated some based on lack of vigor or productivity.